Friday 16 October 2020

Psalm 147

Background

We have rightly noticed that Jesus, 'our high priest’, is tempted as we are, and filled at times with fear, sadness and doubt. We also notice that we have in Jesus one who is “holy, blameless, undefiled, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens” (7:26). This is the mystery. God is with us in Jesus, bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, and blood of our blood. But Jesus is also above us, “exalted above the heavens”. If he wasn’t the first, but only above us, how could he be there for us? If he wasn’t the second, exalted above the heavens, how would his being near us matter? It is the incarnation that is the game-changer, God who so radically reaches out to us that he ‘makes the God-head known’.

I have a very limited lay person’s interest in quantum mechanics. I struggle through books and listen to lectures on the paradoxical, almost nonsensical (to me!) attempts to describe energy and matter in a consistent way. Among the things that fascinate me is that the world of physics seems to be struggling with the essential mystery of things. They are mysterious because they are actually beyond the human being to grasp all at once. This is theology; sometimes we have to realise we won’t understand. Then we are only left with, "wonder love and praise" as Charles Wesley expressed it, or as Isaac Watts wrote:

Almighty God, to thee be endless honours done,
The undivided Three, and the mysterious One,
Where reason fails with all her pow’rs,
There faith prevails, and love adores.

To Ponder:

• Instead of struggling with our natural human inclination to reason and thinking, allow yourself today simply to contemplate what we do not understand. Be in love with God, ‘ineffably sublime’.